Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Giving technical presentations

    Presentation Zen: No excuse for boring an audience: Advice on giving technical presentations:

    Long before “death-by-powerpoint” or vertigo-by-prezi, there were bad presentations. Really bad presentations. So don’t blame the software. The genesis of painfully dull or muddled presentations predates the computer. No one knows this better than scientists, researchers, and academics, who have long been required to attend numerous conferences each year, conferences which typically feature a keynote speaker and scores of shorter presentations by others in their field.

    At least I rarely see bullet lists…

  • Seventy WPM typists can’t tell you where keys are on the QWERTY keyboard

    Typists who clear 70 wpm can’t even say where the keys are

    The majority of typists couldn’t tell you how they type if they tried, according to a study published in October in the scientific journal Attention, Perception, and Pschyophysics. The finding comes from a body of typists who averaged 72 words per minute but could not map more than an average of 15 keys on a QWERTY keyboard.

    I know I don’t think about where the keys are, I just type. Anytime I take a
    typing test, if they don’t use words and just random letters I do worse.

  • If anyone needs an idea on what to get me for Christmas

    Harrison Ford “Han Solo” DL-44 Blaster from Star Wars

    Particularly noteworthy scenes requiring this lighter version are when Darth
    Vader uses the Force to lasso the blaster out of Han’s hand in Empire, and in
    Jedi when Han wrestles with a Stormtrooper to regain possession of his blaster
    during the Rebels’ encounter with Imperial forces on Endor.

    This would be awesome!

    Via: Lot 379: Han Solo’s DL-44 Blaster From ‘The Empire Strikes Back’

  • View near realtime satellite imagery of Earth

    Near Real-Time Satellite Images of Earth

    On November 25th UrtheCast launched two cameras aboard a Soyuz rocket. The
    rocket delivered the cameras to the International Space Station where they are
    now being installed. Once the cameras are up and running UrtheCast will begin
    streaming near-realtime satellite imagery of the Earth.

    Neat!

  • Math tricks

    Nix the Tricks

    We are committed teachers who want to take the magic out of mathematics and focus on the beauty of sense-making. We wish for teachers everywhere to seek coherence and connection rather than offer students memorized procedures and short-cutting tricks. Students are capable of rich conceptual understanding; don’t rob them of the opportunity to experience the discovery of new concepts.

    It’s a free eBook about the math
    tricks that masquerade as teaching concepts. I have mixed feelings, it seems
    like I use a lot of tricks. But at the same time, I do understand the concepts
    and why the trick works. Maybe that’s the difference?

    Via: dy/dan

  • Top five edtech buzzwords

    Top 5 buzzwords in higher education technology circles

    Educators, technologists, and campus decision makers who reside in the educational technology bubble speak the ed-tech vernacular like a second language, frequently using words and phrases wholly foreign to many in higher education.

    Agree? Disagree?

  • Note taking skills

    Tips for Developing Students’ Note-taking Skills writes:

    Beyond being an essential basic skill, note-taking offers students the opportunity to make the material their own. That doesn’t involve making it mean whatever they want it to mean, but it does allow them to interact with it in ways that develop the learner’s understanding of it. Now, this doesn’t happen when students equate note-taking with stenography and copy down exactly what the teacher says, and it doesn’t happen when students recopy their notes and think that’s studying. But it does happen when students work on and with their notes—when they put definitions into their own works, when they list relevant pages in the text, when they re-order the material so that it better connects with their knowledge, and when they write summaries and relate details to main points.

  • Dropbox in the paperless classroom

    Dropbox Organization Tips for Teachers and the Paperless Classroom

    Dropbox is an essential for me. I like apps that link with Dropbox in every way and it is an essential part of my paperless routine with my students. This past Sunday at #txeduchat I was asked some specific questions about how I use Dropbox to take my classroom as paperless as possible, so I thought I’d make it my app of the week and teach you some things that might be helpful.

    And if you are a Google Apps for Education school, most of these tips can apply directly to Google Drive.

  • The positive effects of art

    Art Makes You Smart

    A few years ago, however, we had a rare opportunity to explore such relationships when the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in Bentonville, Ark. Through a large-scale, random-assignment study of school tours to the museum, we were able to determine that strong causal relationships do in fact exist between arts education and a range of desirable outcomes.

    Students who, by lottery, were selected to visit the museum on a field trip demonstrated stronger critical thinking skills, displayed higher levels of social tolerance, exhibited greater historical empathy and developed a taste for art museums and cultural institutions.

    It will be interesting if this is reproducible (or maybe the
    Slashdot
    comments put a bad taste in my mouth :-).

    Learning to Think Critically – Abstract
    via: Art Makes Students Smart – Slashdot

  • 12 ways to use Google Drive in education

    12 Effective Ways To Use Google Drive In Education

    …I stumbled across a fabulous new visual guide put together by Susan Oxnevad on Glogster. In the graphic, she showcases a dozen different ways to easily and effectively integrate Google Drive into your classroom.